Shopify 2.0 made stores easier for humans to manage. But as more store operations shift to agents, the simpler logic behind Shopify 1.0 may be better for testing velocity, execution, and Agentic CRO.
By David Conforti
Jul 28, 2026
Here’s my red-hot take: for where commerce is headed, Shopify 1.0 may actually be better than Shopify 2.0.
Not because Shopify 2.0 was a mistake. It wasn’t. Shopify 2.0 was a huge win for merchants, marketers, and agencies: it gave non-technical teams more control, made themes more modular, and made it easier to shape pages without calling a developer every five minutes. That was the right product for the last phase of ecommerce. But we’re moving into a different one now.
Shopify 2.0 was built for a world where writing code was the bottleneck. Merchants needed more control without waiting on a developer. In an AI world, shipping code is cheap; deciding what to ship is the hard part. The real constraint is operators who have actually built and scaled brands and can point both humans and agents at the right problems.
As more store management gets handled by AI and agents, the best storefront system is no longer just the one that’s easiest for a human merchant to click around in. It’s the one that’s easiest for a machine to understand, edit, validate, and improve. That’s why this matters.
This all clicked for me reading this tweet. It sounds like bait, but it’s directionally right. The more interesting story isn’t that Shopify is “reverting.” It’s that Shopify is recognizing something most brands haven’t caught up to yet: readable code is becoming a strategic advantage again.
I don’t care about theme architecture as an abstract developer debate. I care about speed.
How quickly can a brand go from insight to implementation?
How quickly can you identify friction on a PDP, launch a new landing page, test a merchandising change, adjust a cart experience, or spin up a better collection layout without creating operational drag? That is the core of strong conversion rate optimization. That is the real question.
For years, Shopify 2.0 was a strong answer for human workflows. If a marketer or merchant wanted more control over layout, sections and blocks were a major improvement. But AI does not work like a merchant in the theme editor. Agents do not benefit from more knobs and menus. They benefit from clearer logic, tighter structure, explicit rules, and cleaner feedback.
Shopify is moving back toward a better surface for agents
What Shopify is doing here is important.
In the new developer preview, page structure moves back into Liquid templates instead of living primarily in JSON. Shopify is also introducing {% block %} and {% partial %} so themes can be composed in readable code while still supporting reusable components and fine-grained updates. At a practical level, that means you (or more likely your coding agent) can open a template and understand how the page is built without reconstructing it from JSON, sections, settings, schemas, and editor state.
That is an agent-experience improvement.
And in 2026, that allows you to test, learn, and iterate quicker – it’s a competitive advantage.
Shopify 2.0 was better for human flexibility
Shopify 2.0 gave merchants more freedom, and that mattered.
But it also made storefront logic more fragmented. Once templates became JSON-driven, understanding a page became less about reading one system and more about cross-referencing five. Humans can do that. Slowly. Agents can do it too, but with more room for hallucination, error, and messy execution.
The issue is not that JSON is bad. The issue is that serialized configuration is a worse operating surface when you want AI to take meaningful action inside a storefront.
If an agent needs to restructure a module, add a conversion element, rewrite a content block, change hierarchy, or ship a test, readable Liquid plus HTML is simply a better medium. It is more expressive. More local. More inspectable. More editable.
That matters when the job is not just generating ideas. It is getting work live.
Readability is now a revenue lever
This is where the conversation gets bigger than theme development.
For most brands, CRO still moves too slowly. There are too many handoffs. Too many tickets. Too many waiting points between “we found the issue” and “the fix is live.” That model does not hold up if AI is going to become a real execution layer inside ecommerce.
If you want agents to support merchandising, landing page production, cart optimization, PDP testing, content deployment, and QA, then the storefront has to be legible enough for them to work inside it safely. That’s where our Agentic Commerce work moves from theory into execution: we go from insight to a designed prototype, straight into a Liquid template, and into production — compressing an iterative loop that used to take weeks down to hours.
Readable code is not just cleaner; it makes that loop possible, transforming operator insight into live tests with minimal friction.
That is why I think Shopify’s move matters so much. It points toward a world where the highest-converting stores are not just the prettiest or the most customizable. They are the ones built on systems that AI can actually operate.
This is the real Agentic CRO angle
A lot of people hear “agentic commerce” and think faster copy generation.
That is the shallow version. The real opportunity is operational.
In an AI powered stack, building is no longer the hard part. Knowing what to build is. Agentic CRO pairs experienced operators with agents so insight moves to prototype, to Liquid, to live test in hours instead of weeks. That judgment layer is what we have at Avenue Z.
For that to work, the storefront has to be clear enough for agents to act safely. Shopify is starting to design for that reality on purpose, with better structure, contracts, and feedback so merchants, developers, apps, and agents can all operate against the same system.
My take
Shopify 1.0 is not “better” in every way.
But the principle that made early Shopify so powerful absolutely is becoming more valuable again: you could open the code, understand the store, and change it with confidence.
That is what Shopify is reaching back for. Not because the company is nostalgic. Because AI rewards the same things good operators and good developers always wanted in the first place: legibility, simplicity, explicit rules, and fast feedback.
In other words, the future of ecommerce may look a lot more like the past than people expected. And for brands serious about growth, that is good news.
Talk to our CRO experts
If you’re rethinking how AI should fit into your Shopify stack, CRO roadmap, or experimentation workflow, talk to the team trusted by top-performing brands. As a Platinum Shopify Partner and specialist CRO team, Avenue Z builds storefront systems that are easier to optimize, easier to scale, and better suited for agent-led commerce.
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